DE Shaw aka David Shaw engages in shorting as well as going long. Wonder how much he was shorting in October 2007 with maybe Soros, Flowers and John Paulson.
Shaw was one of the hedge funds that got their a*ses kicked by Porsche when the hedgies shorted VW and did not know that Porsche had locked up all the shares on the German options markets. The hedgies lost $8 billion in one day!
They did not know the Herr Doctor CFO at Porsche had run the Stuttgart Options Exchange and knew the ropes. Porsche was trying to buy up VW shares and the hedge funds were screwing with Porsche and betting the deal would noty go through. Porscvhe tore them all a new one. Priceless.
BTW - hedge funds were essentially made illegal after the 1929 market crash. Theywere called investment pools then but they manipulate the markets for profit among other things.
Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee, has hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job. Johnson earned $21,000,000 in just his last year at Fannie Mae.
Mr. Johnson worked an angle with other prominent democrat Henry Cisneros and Countrywide. The operation went belly up.
Henry Cisneros and James Johnson partnered at Lago Vista-KB Homes, Countrywide, Sub-Prime Mortgages
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/series/the_reckoning/index.html